Premise:
This was an experiment. As a writer, could I make the on-line journal of a
Chicago hitman feel real enough for readers to connect with on a human level?
Could I make him so every-man that readers see that any stranger on the street
could be this guy?
Cast:
KT
Commentary:
I did this blog for more than a year before I stopped. At the beginning I
had plenty of entries pre-written. I had story lines for him and a couple
of longer-arching plots. He got more readers than I did, and while a few people
seemed sure he wasn't real, he did get email from some. People did seem to
connect to his real, day-to-day kinds of problems. They were problems we all
have and can relate to. When his mother died of cancer at least one reader
cried. I wasn't sure how to feel about that, and debated for months whether
I should shut it down and come clean about it. I was starting to feel bad
about it.
And then more and more blogs came out where the general consensus was that people were blogging fictional characters to try and get exposure as writers. Some blogs were getting book deals on the premise that if it was real, it would sell, and if it was fiction, it was still very well done fiction. I didn't want people thinking I'd done it to sell a book. That thought did come to me along the way, but that wasn't the original intention.
And then a Chicago judge's family was killed execution style in their home. It was the lead story on the Chicago Tribune for all of that week. Every day at work I wrote out in my head the daily commentary he should have posted about it. I photocopied the articles and highlighted the parts I wanted him to comment on in particular. But each night when I got home from work there were other things to occupy me with, and KT and his blog got neglected.
At the end of the week I tried to come up with something I could post that would explain his not commenting on it. Other times I had fallen behind on posting, or something had happened that his readers expected him to have an opinion on. Each of those times he had an explanation. Often it was because he was out of town "working". He couldn't talk about a job he'd just done, so often when he came back from one he'd talk about a prior one. If he went more than a week without posting, people kept coming back, waiting for the juicy stuff when he got back.
And then a second week went by, and I didn't know what to post. By the end of that week I'd pretty much decided that if I was going to post something, it had better be good. I felt like I was letting my readers down. I owed them better. I had to decide to either get serious and committed to it, or let it go. In the end, there were other things I needed to put my time and energy in, so I let him go. No goodbye post, no explanations. I just let him vanish. Months later his traffic still hasn't gone down. It took a month for the first "where are you?" post. People are apparently still waiting for the juicy return.